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We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-05 Francesco Giovannoni , Toomas Hinnosaar

This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Ali Khodabakhsh , Emmanouil Pountourakis , Samuel Taggart

We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Michal Feldman , Liat Yashin

Principal agent games are a growing area of research which focuses on the optimal behaviour of a principal and an agent, with the former contracting work from the latter, in return for providing a monetary award. While this field…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2022-06-28 Dena Firoozi , Arvind V Shrivats , Sebastian Jaimungal

We initiate the study of a repeated principal-agent problem over a finite horizon $T$, where a principal sequentially interacts with $K\geq 2$ types of agents arriving in an adversarial order. At each round, the principal strategically…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Junyan Liu , Arnab Maiti , Artin Tajdini , Kevin Jamieson , Lillian J. Ratliff

In many scenarios, a principal dynamically interacts with an agent and offers a sequence of incentives to align the agent's behavior with a desired objective. This paper focuses on the problem of synthesizing an incentive sequence that,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-20 Yagiz Savas , Vijay Gupta , Ufuk Topcu

We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-03-09 Wei Zhao , Claudio Mezzetti , Ludovic Renou , Tristan Tomala

Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Michal Feldman

This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tian Bai , Yiding Feng , Yaohao Liu , Mengfan Ma , Mingyu Xiao

We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Siyu Chen , Jibang Wu , Yifan Wu , Zhuoran Yang

We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Yakov Babichenko , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Haifeng Xu , Konstantin Zabarnyi

This paper studies continuous-time optimal contracting in a hierarchy problem which generalises the model of Sung (2015). The hierarchy is modeled by a series of interlinked principal-agent problems, leading to a sequence of Stackelberg…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-22 Emma Hubert

Agent-based models provide a constructive approach to studying emergent dynamics in life-like systems composed of interacting, adaptive agents. Financial markets serve as a canonical example of such systems, where collective price dynamics…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-04-28 Ryuji Hashimoto , Ryosuke Takata , Masahiro Suzuki , Yuki Tanaka , Kiyoshi Izumi

In this paper we study a principal-agent problem in continuous time with multiple lump-sum payments (contracts) paid at different deterministic times. We reduce the non-zero sum Stackelberg game between the principal and agent to a standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-08 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren , Liwei Huang

We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-07-04 Mira Frick , Ryota Iijima , Yuhta Ishii

Many real-world systems such as taxi systems, traffic networks and smart grids involve self-interested actors that perform individual tasks in a shared environment. However, in such systems, the self-interested behaviour of agents produces…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-01-31 David Mguni , Joel Jennings , Sergio Valcarcel Macua , Emilio Sison , Sofia Ceppi , Enrique Munoz de Cote

A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Matteo Castiglioni , Junjie Chen , Yingkai Li

We study the problem of designing autonomous agents that can learn to cooperate effectively with a potentially suboptimal partner while having no access to the joint reward function. This problem is modeled as a cooperative episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Thomas Kleine Buening , Anne-Marie George , Christos Dimitrakakis

We consider a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem where each agent seeks to maximize a shared reward while interacting with other agents, and they may or may not be able to communicate. Typically the agents do not have access to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Alex Tong Lin , Mark J. Debord , Katia Estabridis , Gary Hewer , Guido Montufar , Stanley Osher

We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-18 Bo Peng , Zhihao Gavin Tang
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